Gabby Logan interview: 'Football reflects where we are as a civilisation' (2025)

Gabby Logan was about six years old when a group of boys at school started poking fun at her dad, Terry Yorath. He was a professional footballer for Coventry City at the time and when his young daughter told him about the jibes he instructed her to “Go and ask them what their dad does. Whatever it is, I bet he’d rather be a footballer”.

“Protective” is how Logan describes her feelings towards football (and her dad) in those early years of her life. “When you’re a kid and it’s something you’re immersed in, you feel quite defensive of them, the team they are with and the people that they call their colleagues and friends,” she says. “I was always trying to defend his honour.”

Now one of Britain’s most well-respected sports broadcasters, Logan is busy prepping for her role presenting the Women’s European Championship for the BBC when The Athletic catches up with her. It’s the latest instalment in a career that has already lasted more than 25 years and a relationship with football that goes back almost twice as long, enduring tragedy and triumph along the way.

At the start, football meant her grandparents’ house on a Saturday afternoon, the mouth-watering smell of bacon sandwiches and the sound of the football results being read out on their tiny television. Logan would be dropped there before matches along with her brother and sister while their mum, Christine, went to watch Yorath play for Leeds United. “My grandma Sheila had the cafe opposite Elland Road for many years and she would do all the pre-match bacon butties,” she says.

“I was about four years old and it was that Saturday routine: Dad was going to work, Mum was going to watch him and we were at my gran’s because we were too young for Mum to have the three of us at a game — we were four, three and one at the time. I remember Mum and Dad swooping in to pick us up post-match, my dad with his aftershave on and Mum looking very glamorous.”

By the time she was eight, Yorath had moved from Leeds United to Coventry City and then to Tottenham Hotspur. Coupled with having a mum who was a property enthusiast, it meant Logan had lived in three different houses by the time she was four. That included a much-loved home in Coventry that the family bought from club chairman Jimmy Hill. The house came with a surprise bonus when Hill’s dog Sally insisted on returning so many times that the Yorath family ended up adopting her.

Logan’s first taste of the sacrifices football families often have to make came when Yorath signed for Spurs and her mum’s search for a north London home to match the one they had in Coventry hit a dead end. “To get that kind of house he would have had to be the manager of the Bank of England,” says Logan. “On a 1980s footballer’s salary, we weren’t going to be able to afford a house like that in London.” So Yorath rented a small property in Enfield while his wife and children stayed in Coventry. “It meant we didn’t see him every day anymore but that’s the kind of sacrifice football families make. You’re either moving all the time or you’re just not seeing them all the time.”

A few years later, the distance increased even further when Yorath signed for Vancouver Whitecaps in the North American Soccer League (NASL). Before the family could join him, the house in Coventry had to be sold and their lives dismantled, which took the best part of a year. “I remember really missing him then because it felt like he was on another planet,” says Logan. “We didn’t see him on telly doing his job or in the paper. There was no media presence for the NASL and there was no internet so it felt like he was gone — like he’d disappeared, almost.”

Shortly before her dad’s move to Vancouver, Logan overheard a conversation between her parents that left her in tears. They were talking about Yorath’s plans to go into management once his playing career came to an end. “I was about seven and I didn’t fully understand what that meant. I thought it was the referee and I remember crying in bed thinking he was going to be the man in the middle and was going to get so much abuse. And, ‘why would he do that job?’”

Her fears were allayed after a conversation with her mum the next morning but when Yorath’s transition started, with a player/assistant coach role at Bradford City in 1982, she quickly noticed the difference. “He was kind of gone all the time then; longer days, weekends, evenings doing scouting,” she says. “It felt like he’d suddenly got a proper, full-time job. From then on he was even less involved in our day-to-day lives.”

It was a few years into Yorath’s time at Bradford that tragedy struck. On May 11, 1985, Bradford were playing Lincoln City in the final game of the season when a fire broke out in the main stand shortly before half-time. It spread rapidly, engulfing the whole stand within minutes and trapping some fans in their seats.

Logan was there that day and remembers it clearly. “Everything was gearing up for this wonderful final match of the season where the result didn’t matter because Bradford were already assured of their promotion and the championship. Everybody wanted to come. My dad’s parents came up from Cardiff. His best mate came. There was a lot of excitement and plans being made all week about what was going to happen on Saturday night.”

The extra demand for seats meant Logan, her sister Louise and brother Daniel wouldn’t be sitting where they normally would — in the main stand, and about two rows back from where the fire started. Instead, the three of them — all smartly dressed in new clothes for the occasion — sat in a block of seats to the left of the main stand from where they watched most of the first half.

“Five minutes before half-time, not unusually, my mum decided to go to the players’ lounge and she shouted down to us asking whether we wanted to go or meet her there,” Logan says. “Thankfully we said we’d go then. If we’d stayed, and the fire had started I don’t know if I’d be talking to you now.”

Logan remembers being in the bar and hearing the first shout that a fire had started. The cry of “Everyone, get out now!” was initially met with apathy, until the door was opened and people saw the smoke. As they spilt out onto the street, Logan looked up at the sky. It had turned sepia, so thick was the smoke in the air.

“The fire was catching hold already. Within minutes flames were 20-30 feet into the air. There was lots of noise, chaos, screaming and people trying to find people.”

Logan’s brother hadn’t come to the players’ lounge with his sisters, choosing instead to go to his dad’s office where he would often pinch sweets from the desk. As the extent of the fire became clear, Logan’s mum started to panic. When he soon emerged, having been found in the office by a player and taken up to the street, the relief was palpable.

Unable to get away from the ground, because their car was parked too close to the stadium, the family were shepherded up the road to a pub where images from the ground appeared on television screens. “The reporter was saying there could be some injuries and you could see the adults in the group looking at each other as if to say, ‘There’s more than injuries here, there’s going to be a catastrophic death toll’.”

It took a few hours for Logan’s dad to emerge. When he did, the first thing Logan noticed was the blood splattered down one side of his leg where his tracksuit bottoms had been ripped open. “He’d been telling people to leave this other bar but they wouldn’t,” says Logan. “In the end, the door he wanted to go out of wasn’t safe so he’d jumped out of a window and cut his leg.

“For our family, unbelievably, that was the only mark of the day. All the other people who had tickets from us had got out safely. We were a very lucky family.”

Others were not so fortunate: 56 lives were lost that day with hundreds more wounded, many suffering from severe burns.

For 12-year-old Logan, it was the start of a difficult period in her relationship with football. A few weeks later, the Heysel Stadium disaster led to the death of 39 people and injuries to hundreds more when fans were crushed against a wall that then collapsed during the European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus.

“It was also a time when there was a lot of crowd trouble at games,” says Logan. “Especially at Leeds matches, there was quite a threatening air.

“Bradford and Leeds played each other the following season at Elland Road and I remember going to that game and feeling really unsafe. There were a lot of skirmishes in the crowd. It was a very hostile atmosphere and I just didn’t like it anymore. I felt like I wasn’t safe.

“Where the players’ cars were parked at the back of Elland Road was away from where the crowds come out so that felt like a safe area, and Mum let me and my sister go and sit in the car for the second half. I just remember feeling quite vulnerable and like it wasn’t a place for me. At that time, you didn’t see many families going to football matches, nor many girls or women. It was a tough time to enjoy it.”

Over the following years, Logan’s own sporting endeavours (she competed in rhythmic gymnastics and represented Wales at the 1990 Commonwealth Games) took up increasing amounts of her focus and time. Coupled with her dad’s new job as manager of Swansea City, far from the family home (Logan’s mum had decided not to move home again while she and her siblings were in an important period of their education), it meant she was “falling out of the rhythm of going to games”.

Yorath’s move to become Wales manager in 1988 sparked a slight change in that the games were less frequent, and so the family would make more of an effort to attend. But it was the tragic events of May 25, 1992, that had the biggest impact on Logan’s ties to the game.

She was 19 years old when her brother, Daniel (15), dropped to the ground while playing football in the garden with their dad and never got up. He had an undetected congenital heart disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), which causes the walls of the heart chamber to become thicker than normal and can reduce the amount of blood taken in and pumped out to the body with each heartbeat.

“He had no symptoms at all and was a very healthy young man on the outside,” Logan says. “He’d been signed by Leeds United and was due to start his professional footballing life in the June just after his GCSEs. He’d played golf that day and was watching the PGA from Wentworth with my dad on the telly. Then they’d gone out for a kickabout post-dinner time.

“He fell over when he went to pick up a ball and didn’t get up. My dad went over and turned him over, thinking he was joking. They called an ambulance and he was rushed to hospital but he probably died straight away on the grass because there was no way of reviving him. He was pronounced dead later that evening by the same doctor who had delivered me into the world — the Leeds United doctor, who happened to be on duty in the hospital. He was the one who had the awful task of telling my parents.

“My sister and I were away from home at the time. I was on a gap year and my sister was a model and living in Japan so it was just Mum and Dad and the two boys at home. It was very much a life-changing day.”

It would be understandable if Logan and her family had felt the need to distance themselves from the game at that point. But there was no opportunity for that. Three weeks after Daniel’s death, Yorath was back with the Wales team who were in the early stages of their qualifying campaign for the 1994 World Cup. It was a campaign that gathered momentum over the following 18 months as Wales came within 90 minutes of becoming the only home nation to make it to USA ’94 (though their chances were scuppered by defeat to Romania in their final qualification game).

“Football was already back as part of our lives very quickly,” says Logan. “It was a way of finding some kind of comfort in that success and that run. And Daniel just adored Wales — he was fanatical.”

Logan’s relationship with the game evolved over the following years. The family were all into Leeds United, given her dad’s involvement with the club and Daniel’s planned pathway into the team. They were the last champions of the old top division before the launch of the Premier League in August 1992 and Logan found herself following their progress throughout that first season, and beyond.

“Subconsciously, I started to become more interested again. I’d look at the Leeds team over the following weeks and months thinking, ‘Would he have been in the academy with Daniel? Would Daniel be getting into the team by now?’. Then two years later, ‘Would he have got a first-team start yet? Would he be in this team?’. It was that connection that initially drew me back in.

“It’s something I subconsciously carried on doing into my professional life. I’d be doing research and see a player born in the same year and think… so he’s getting older in my head with these players. He’d be in his mid-40s now and I think, ‘Would he be managing? Would he still be in the game?’. In the first few years that was something that definitely drew me back in.”

A career in football was never in Logan’s plans, but when her presenting role on local radio in Durham gave her the opportunity to be a pitchside reporter at Newcastle United games, it set her on the path to where she is today: leading coverage of a major tournament on mainstream television.

Not only that: a major women’s tournament.

“Through my whole school life football was off the agenda for girls,” says Logan. “I had one school teacher who tried to get a five-a-side team together in my high school and I joined that but we couldn’t get any fixtures or do anything other than train in the indoor gym, so everyone went back to netball because at least we could get fixtures for that.”

Logan also recalls there being “mixed emotions” from the general viewing public when she was given the role of co-presenting the Saturday lunchtime football show On the Ball on ITV in the late ’90s — a time when the sight and sound of a woman talking about football came as quite a shock to many.

“I think I got away with it because, had social media existed, I’m not sure I could have taken what was probably being said verbally by people who were watching the telly. I’m sure there were a lot of people going, ‘What’s a woman doing on here?’, and they would have gone on social media and said that, and it would have been hard to take as a 24-year-old.

“I was lucky to get to 2010 before I got a Twitter account, too. By that point, I had a good decade of working on TV so I was able to take the inevitable comments that would come my way with much more confidence and more than a pinch of salt. Unless it was someone being really abusive I would just ignore it because there was no point engaging half the time with the kind of things people might say.”

Her journey as a broadcaster and her experiences of covering the women’s game mean that Logan has been at the forefront as the game has become increasingly inclusive. Neither has been straightforward. She covered the Women’s World Cup in China in 2007 and is honest about the difficulty of “being really enthusiastic about something but knowing that it’s not quite there yet. The domestic product is miles better now”.

It has been, she says, “a beautiful evolution to watch”, and an important one. “Football reflects so many attitudes in society. Sometimes I think it reflects where we are as a civilisation in terms of attitudes and how important subjects like racism and homophobia are handled. If football treats it seriously then it sends a really strong message. That’s why the women’s game being so much more professional is really important in terms of women’s sport generally and women’s access to things they want to do in society.”

What does she think the teenage Logan would say if she could go back and tell the girl, who would rather sit in a car park than be in a football ground, that the game could be like this? “I don’t think she’d believe you. That seemed like a pipe dream. I didn’t see it happening in my lifetime and I certainly didn’t ever think I’d be not just working but also be incredibly proud to work in that environment.”

(Top photo: BBC)